Google Shuts down Hotpot, Continuing Its Services in Google Places

Google has made the decision of shutting down its only five year old feature, Hotpot. Hotpot was a very catchy feature of Google Places as it used to automatically suggest places to visit for the users through an engine which calculated the odds of the user liking that place. The name of the production ‘Hotpot’ has been known to be suspended but most of the technology and the services it offered are still to be a part of the Google Places experience, both on the web and in Google mobile apps.

So it will not be wrong to assume that Hotpot, still lives in Google Places, and Google hasn't totally lost the support for the services it offered of the place suggestions. But the users will soon realize that the mobile interface of Google Place Page is a little tempered as the name of Hotpot gets removed the ratings and place discovery features are now dumped deep down the page. Though the users addicted to those features can just scroll down the page avail the service.

According to the product manager of Hotpot in Google Inc., Lior Ron, says that the reorganization of Google Inc. has turned out to be the last day for Hotpot. He said that "The [Hotpot] community has quickly expanded to millions of users who are rating more than one million times per month and enjoying a truly personalized view of the world."

This change, however, might be related to the takeover of the company by another co-founder, Larry Page, who rejoined the company after almost a year. Page reorganized the entire management of the company as his first step towards new reign within the company.

The original idea which gave birth to the product of Hotpot was for the users to rate and review different places. Whereas, later the user can find their friends on Google to see their friends’ personalized ratings and reviews of certain places and see which place is suggested for them to go. Convincingly when this service seems to be attracting more and more customers, both iPhone and Android apps for Hotpot were released along with the expansion of translating these apps into a total of 47 languages.